Corks and substainabilty

Over the past few weeks, we have finished bottling our Rose – the only wine which we use an artificial cork with. We made this choice several years back to help keep the price of the wine down. Making wine by hand is expensive and even with our Rose, we don’t take short cuts. We still monitor the vineyard carefully, harvest by hand, sort by hand and ferment in wood. (We have experimented with stainless but still prefer wood.) Thus, saving a significant amount on the cork made sense.

We have stuck with real corks for several reasons with our other wines. We want the wines to breathe very slowly and we like the natural aspects of cork. (Why do everything in wood only to have the wine age against plastic?) We also choose them to make sure we were saving forests – I know this doesn’t make sense on the surface. Audubon Magazine has a great article in its most recent issue. Give it a read and perhaps it will make sense.